Erik Newton works at the concession stand at a water park in Moraine, Ohio. He’s going to study firefighting at a community college.

NYT / MARK LYONS

WEST CARROLLTON, Ohio — In the tight-knit, middle-class communities surrounding Dayton, many members of the Class of ’09 knew exactly what they would do when they grew up.

They would get a good-paying job at the General Motors factory or at one of the Delphi auto parts plants, get married and start families.

But the deep recession and the downsizing of American manufacturing have bulldozed those plans, leaving many of these young people confused and rudderless, with some contemplating a path that might be new to their families: college.

“It used to be kids would say, ‘I don’t need to go to college. I can go to work with my dad at GM and have a good life,’ ” said Carol Romie, the chief guidance counselor at West Carrollton High School in this blue-collar Dayton suburb. “With GM closed, that’s not an option nowadays.”

Brandon Abney, a newly minted high school graduate, would have loved to work at the GM truck plant in Moraine, a neighboring suburb, but it closed last December. So he is enrolling in an 18-month college program to become a firefighter. “After what happened at GM, you have to go to college to find a job,” he said.

Dezarae Austin, of the Class of ’09, moved in with a friend after her father lost his job at GM and left the state in search of employment. With the job market offering high school grads little beyond $7.50-an-hour fast-food and supermarket jobs, she is enrolling in community college to become a physician assistant.

Nick Salyers would like to follow in the footsteps of his grandfather, whose 36-year career at a Delco auto parts plant (before it became Delphi) enabled him to buy a spacious house and raise five children. But with that factory closed and his mother and father laid off in recent plant closings, he has chosen a career in the military.

“I needed something secure,” he said. “No matter what happens, I’ll always have a job in the Army. I don’t have to worry about getting laid off. I don’t have to experience what my parents experienced.”

Call them Generation R — Generation Recession — the millions of teenagers and twenty-somethings struggling to carve out a future for themselves when the nation’s economy is in its worst shape in decades. Many are settling for second choices or pursuing low-cost detours because the recession has wiped out hoped-for jobs and left families financially battered.

Far beyond Dayton — where the huge, shuttered GM plant not long ago employed 4,000 people — millions of young Americans are facing the reality that manufacturing will no longer serve as a conveyor belt to the middle class.

Dayton is a vortex of that economic and social change. The area’s job total has fallen 12 percent since 2000, while about half of its factory jobs — 38,000 out of 79,000 — have disappeared this decade. Not only have large GM and Delphi plants closed, but NCR, long the city’s corporate jewel, is moving its headquarters to the Atlanta area.

These are body blows to a can-do city long known for innovation. (Dayton was the Wright Brothers’ hometown and a GM boomtown, because of Charles Kettering, who invented the electric starter and founded Delco — originally the Dayton Engineering Laboratories Co. — before GM acquired it.)

“In the ’60s and ’70s, you could get a good job at Delco, NCR, Frigidaire, Inland, Dayton Press, the Standard Register, Chrysler,” said David Hicks, Moraine’s city manager. “They came with good benefits and good pay.”

Fred Gehron, the principal of West Carrollton High School, remembers what happened when he graduated from high school in 1966 and told his parents he wanted to go to college. “I remember them rolling their eyes,” he said. “My father asked, ‘Are you sure that’s necessary? Why not get a job at the steel mill where your brother works?’ ”

Rob Alsept, financial secretary for the GM union local here, says he took a job at the plant in 1989 at age 19, and bought a house and had a family the next year.

The GM plant’s basic wage was $28 an hour when it closed. “For the laid-off guys, the highest-paying job I’ve heard anyone find was $13 an hour,” Alsept said. His daughter, several years out of high school, has moved to Texas because her husband landed a $17-an-hour job there as an oil-field apprentice.

The brightest spot in Dayton’s economy is Wright-Patterson Air Force Base, which emerged a winner in the base realignment process and planned to add 1,000 jobs, one-third of them requiring Ph.D.’s.

“I would adamantly say the days of finding good-paying jobs that will support an individual or family with just a high-school education are gone,” said Matt Massie, director of career services at Sinclair Community College in Dayton.

Since the recession began, enrollment at Sinclair has jumped 14 percent, largely because many laid-off workers have returned to school and because the uninviting job market has pushed many high school grads into college.

Thomas Kokenge, the guidance counselor for West Carrollton High’s graduating seniors, advised them not to let the hard times change their goals. “I tell them, ‘Do something that you have a passion for,’ ” he said. “I don’t see them lowering their horizons. But maybe they have to take a longer way to get there.”

Guidance counselors say that the nearly 40 percent of Dayton-area graduates who attend four-year colleges should do fine once the economy rebounds.

Todd Salyers, who lost his job when the Delphi plant closed, is proud, but somewhat worried that his son, Nick, is joining the Army. Nick wants to serve his country, but he also enlisted because the job market is so bad and the Army will help pay for college.

Said Todd Salyers, “My father always told us, ‘As long as you put in an honest day’s pay and are an honest person, you’d be okay.’ That’s not even close to being right anymore.”

Erik Newton, who graduated from West Carrollton High this spring, will be going to Sinclair to study firefighting with Brandon Abney. His mother, a laid-off GM worker, will also be there, studying to become a social worker.